10,000 Watch UAP over Florence in 1954
Referee stops soccer match as fans, players watch UFOs frolic among the clouds and drop 'angel hair' on stadium and city.
A crowd of 10,000 gathered on October 27, 1954 in Stadio Artemio Franchi to watch AC Firenze Fiorentina take the pitch with Football Club Pistoiese SSD, rivals from the Tuscan city of Pistoia visiting Florence for a friendly match.
Shortly after the teams took the pitch for the second half, at about 20 past 2, the referee whistled play to a halt to assess a penalty against a Fiorentina player. The jeering and cheering quickly turned to an eerie silence as players, coaches, medical staff and other good people at the game looked up with astonishment.
In the sky above, something was putting on a show. Some witnesses reported seeing one egg-shaped object moving slowly across the sky. Others reported several similar objects darting about. Others reported many objects of several types, some shaped like “Cuban cigars” and others resembling spheres or eggs, frolicking in the sky above the stadium.
News reports indicated the referee stopped play for 15 minutes. Then, the objects departed as mysteriously as they had arrived. After the aerial show was gone, many in the stadium reported a fall of “angel hair” — described by one there as a silvery, fibrous substance, like “wet string,” that fell from the sky.
Here’s more on the story from a feature article in the BBC News Magazine:
Excerpt…
One of the footballers on the pitch was Ardico Magnini - he was something of a legend at the club and had played for Italy at the 1954 World Cup.
“I remember everything from A to Z,” he says. “It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.
“We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked.”
Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee’s match report.
Among the crowd was Gigi Boni, a lifelong Fiorentina fan. “I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight,” he says. His description of multiple objects differs slightly from Magnini’s.
“They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked.”
Boni has spent many years reliving that day in his mind. “I think they were extra-terrestrial. That's what I believe, and there's no other explanation I can give myself.”
Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, still sprightly in his 70s, agrees. “In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real.”
The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria — there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence.
Another man who relishes the chance to speak about that day is Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy’s National UFO Centre, external. He has written many books about UFOs and his home in the centre of Florence is stuffed full of alien memorabilia, posters of old Italian B-movies, framed newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs of blurry flying saucers.
“The players and the public were stunned seeing these objects above the stadium,” Pinotti says.
“At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course now we know that is not so — but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked with anything we know on Earth.”
He’s also intrigued by the material that fell from the sky — what Magnini describes as silver glitter.
“It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this ‘angel hair’,” says Pinotti.
“The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates.” As a 10-year-old-boy he witnessed this phenomenon himself. “I remember, in broad daylight, seeing the roofs of the houses in Florence covered in this white substance for one hour and, like snow, it just evaporated.
“No-one knows what this strange substance has to do with UFOs.”
Variously described by witnesses as similar to cotton wool or cobwebs, the substance was hard to collect because it disintegrated on contact - but some people were determined to find out what it was.
One of them was a journalist at the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, the late Giorgio Batini. In 2003 he told an Italian television programme, Voyager, how on that day he received hundreds of phone calls about the sightings. From the offices of La Nazione in the centre of town his own view of the sky was blocked by the Cathedral, so he went up to the top of the newspaper's building to see what everyone was talking about. The 81-year-old recalled seeing “shiny balls” moving fast towards the dome of the Cathedral.
Batini ventured out to investigate. He came across a wood outside the city that was covered in the white fluff. He gathered several samples by rolling them up on a matchstick, and took them to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. When he got there he found that others had done the same.
The lab, led by respected scientist Prof Giovanni Canneri, subjected the material to spectrographic analysis and concluded that it contained the elements boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and that it was not radioactive. Unfortunately this did not provide any conclusive answers — and the material was destroyed in the process.
Continues...
Click here for the complete story from BBC News Magazine.
Internet historian “Trattoriazaza” wrote:
It was not easy to collect samples (a journalist, at the stadium, put it in a box of Turmak cigarettes), which were sent to the laboratory and analyzed. It emerged that the substance was composed of boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium. It was Professor Giovanni Casseri of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry who announced this discovery.
“It looked like wet string,” one eyewitness reported. Chemical analysis showed it was anything but.
Brian Boldman of NICAP, who investigated a number of “UFO Angel Hair” cases, including Florence, reported:
“Engineering student Alfredo Jacopozzi collected samples in a jar and took it to Professor Cozzi at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of Florence for analysis . . . the substance contained such known elements as boron, silicon, magnesium and calcium…
“While it is true that correlation does not prove causation, the evidence seems overwhelming that angel-hair cases are indeed related to genuine UFOs, and provides more evidence of their reality. Both UFOs and angel hair deserve the serious attention of the scientific community. ”
Source: https://www.nicap.org/articles/IURV26No3.htm
UFO Flap of 1953-54: France and Northern Italy
The UAP witnessed by 10,000 people in broad daylight may be the largest multiple witness sighting of UAP. The event happened during the height of a great wave of sightings occurring across Eastern France and Northern Italy in 1953-1954.
Perhaps due to the colloquial nature of the US press, but this historic sighting is unknown to almost all Americans. It should be big news and now, almost 71 years later, important history.
Something else those interested in space, science, technology, math, history, truth, exploration, adventure and soccer may want to remember or learn:
Florence, Italy — where the Renaissance, where classical ideals in the arts and sciences were rekindled, where genius was celebrated, where the modern world sprang — would almost five centuries later be visited by something strange from the unknown. While who they are or what they want is still unknown, they left a most unusual calling card.